


Following the Light of Long-Dead Stars

by Zagzagael



Category: True Detective
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 04:40:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1926936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode 1.07 - Maggie visits Rust at the bar. She doesn't leave when he tells her to get gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Following the Light of Long-Dead Stars

The mechanics of it. Although somewhat strange and complicated insomuch as how two bodies actually fit together; neither one of them is a mechanic. A practitioner. An adept, an athlete, a connoisseur. They are not Marty. 

Hipbones, spinal columns, thin finger joints, the thumping carotid, the pressure of rolled foreheads, mouths teeth tongues. These are offered up as sacrifices, gifts, ablutions. He kneels between her opened thighs and prays. His cheek pressed against the tender gracilis muscle running the length of the inside of her thigh.

She offers him grace, and he bestows her a joyous humility. 

From her body to his body. And back again. Time immemorial.

***

There is a way in which the mind seizes on a moment, a word, an expression, the possibility of a thing, and devours it. Digests it. Absorbs it into the bloodstream, builds heart muscle with it. She does not examine her psyche with a ground lens but she knows that he has become part of her story. She makes room for him inside of her so that there is no more struggling with his presence. The living haunt that ghosts through her, the shiver down the spine, the tightening of the flesh, the aching absence. This is how he has come to define the edges of her unseen self.

He has been gone for ten years and she has missed him the same way the amputee misses the severed limb. With regret but acceptance. Her life is a limping thing. She knows that he cannot know this. Does not. And she takes comfort in this knowledge, his ignorance of how he crippled her. She wants him whole, wherever he has taken himself. She cannot bear to think of him reduced. Less. In her mind he is always more. Than any of them. 

She dreams of him. The animus who makes love to her in black silk sheets in night-blind rooms, the ceiling of stars vaulting above them. She is the nun he is her priest. She is his confession he is the penance she pays. He the motherless child, she the madonna welcoming him to her with open arms. In the dark, she is always reaching for his hand. 

***

When he was with Laurie, she became the vicarious voyeur. She could oil her friend with two Tanqueray & tonics, a twist of lime, and the words would slip out of the other woman's mouth and slither across the tabletop and she would swallow them down, the raw oyster of them. The aphrodisiac of these bedroom stories. Small encouragements and the payoff painful but worth the digging. He wouldn't go down on her. He preferred her on top. He kept his eyes closed. He was silent as the grave. Completion for him meant disappearing into the bathroom, the sound of running water, a Listerine rinse, and then a smoke out on the porch. 

The small price of a conspiratorial look, trading stories about the size of Marty’s formidable dick, Rust was uncut, a bottle of gin, and the nausea roiling through her guts. It was worth it all. Because she knew, that if she had him in her bed, in the safe clasp of her arms, their secrets would be sacred. 

***

They have changed, the two of them. He has become the alcoholic Philosopher King, she the Cosmo-sipping brittle housewife. They don’t see this in one another. For them, the flesh falls away from the soul. They look with the third eye, the vision of what could have been possible, the overlaying of the vellum on the parchment writ with blood, sweat and cum. And tears. Endless wept tears.

***

“Now get on out of here. You’re classing the place up.”

He disappeared into the backroom of the bar. And her heart followed him. She could feel time slowing to a syrupy crawl. The river that had always flown between them, the two rocks of their bodies, was drying in its bed. She nodded to herself, then stood and walked outside alone. She pulled the luxury SUV around the bar, unsure of any plan of action. She was in the moment now. The present encircling her like a noose. She saw the red Ford at the far end of the broken tarmacked lot, in front of a leaning shotgun duplex. She parked beside it, stashed the keys beneath the front seat, and climbed out. The Louisiana summer heat was a slow death. There was a rusted Griffith porch chair on the cement stoop and she lowered herself into it, crossing her legs at the knee, and wondered how long she would have to wait for him. It wasn’t as long as she would have guessed.

She heard him whistle and watched him tip his head at her, leaning in the opened back door of the bar, looking at her through the thin and humid air dividing them. He shook his head and began the slow, lazy swagger-walk towards her. She knew he would not send her away again. The shuddering of his eyes nearly closed as he walked past her and reached for the doorknob testified to this. He twisted it open, pushed the door in, and stepped aside to let her enter first. Across the threshold through the doorway into a room where they both could rejoice that time was a continuum.

She felt him lean towards her. It slicked her flesh without warning, the anticipation of his hyper-senses, his hands, his mouth, his body. Inside the room, the door shutting quietly behind them, the darkened space all late-afternoon shadows, drawn blinds, and a mattress on the floor. She toed out of her pumps, lifted the dress over her head and turned to him, clothed only in bra and panties and longing. 

She wanted to speak with touch. He stood, very still, watching her from beneath the handsome lowered brow. Slowly she approached him, cautious and gentle, she could see the tremble in his upper lip and she finger-brushed the long mustache hairs along the hard edged bow of it. He lowered his head to hers and she reached around and found the tie that would unloose his hair. He smelled of cigarettes and cold water. 

When his large hands spanned her waist, thumbs pressing against the belt of stretch marks, she went up on tiptoe and pushed her hips into his and then he relented and pulled her tight and fast and hard into his arms. She thought that this was what swooning felt like. 

Between their bodies she began undressing him. He unclasped her bra and tossed it in the direction of the discarded dress. Then he shrugged out of the work shirt, she pushed the trousers over his thin hips and he had to bend to untie his Red Wing contractors. He was hunkered down, she pulled the dingy a-shirt over his head. He buried his face in the juncture of her thighs, pulling at the nylon panties with his teeth, grazing across her skin. And she gasped. 

She did not know that he knew the smell of her. That now he gulped in great heaving lungfuls of her scent, recognizing it, remembering the way it mingled with the sweat and ink-stains of his fingertips a decade before and how he simply had not washed his hands for days afterwards. Days. And long nights. Alone. Opening the memory vault inside his mind again and again and again with the safecracker combination of the smell of her pussy on his skin. 

He stood and surprised her by coaxing her up and into his arms. He was still so frighteningly strong. She hesitated just a moment, no man had ever lifted her bodily against him, but she twined her arms around his neck, he reached down for her left thigh and she complied, up on the toes of her right foot and then she had him wrapped in her legs, his hands on her ass, his mouth wedged wet and fast in the horseshoe of her jaw, her head tipped back, dizzy. The world spinning above her. With a deliberate step he moved to the mattress and bent to his knees, supporting the weight of her body with one hand, the other splayed open on the bed. 

He sat back on his haunches, reaching for the panties, drawing them down her legs, leaning into her calf. She reached for his head with both hands, pulling him down to her. She had to have his mouth on her mouth. He came slowly, melting forward, sliding his arms under her back, finding the place where her spine could fold forward and lifting her up into his lips so that he could run his tongue across each of the floating ribs. 

With her pleading for him to do it, he reached for his cock and fisted himself into her body. The cradle of her hips rocking him home.

***

She knew roughly that it was three in the afternoon when she had arrived at the bar. It had been hours. The map of his body, the journey of his bones. They traveled to places where language was mined like gold from the caves of one another’s mouths.

Her cellphone is in her purse on the floor of the SUV. Her husband is away on a business trip. The cats will be hungry and the blinds uncharacteristically left open. She will not be missed. 

Marty misses her every single day.

She was wrapped in his arms, again, her head on his chest. The shell of her ear pressed against the sound of the ocean breaking inside him. 

“I want time to stop,” she whispered. The room was pitched black, made velvet by the fact of her eyes being closed. The darkness a kind of enveloping package, they had been delivered to one another. 

“Doesn’t work that way.”

She nodded, the skin of her cheek, his body hair, the smell of his sweat. She opened her eyes and breathed through the panic of the dark room, this man, her body, his body. She could feel a chasm calling to her in a seductive voice, the pull of gravity, the desire to fall. Slowly, her vision adjusted, red LED lights on some device, the yellow parking lot lamppost light filtering through the blinds. The cool white shape of him in the black void.

“Just a minute,” he said, and scooted sideways, leaving her bereft. She closed her eyes again and listened to him pull himself to his feet, grunting, then kicking through the clothes they had shed, the snakeskin outgrown, to the bathroom where he flicked on the light and slanted it sideways into the room with a pull on the door. He returned with a lit cigarette. “It’s a strange thing,” he told her, settling back down, urging her with his fingertips to sit up beside him. “You can’t smoke in the dark.”

***

For the rest of her life she will carry these twelve hours as part of her. A poem within her biography. (For him it will be a psalm engraved into his hagiography.) This belongs to her now. It is a completion she could not have envisioned before, when she held herself away from it, fearing a blood-letting or a cancer, an infection, a disease, a birth. The possible rejection, the mind-numbing need. It is none of those things and all of those things. It is the scratch in the record that keeps popping in the same place. It is the broken clock whose hands tell the time only twice a day. The novel with a page torn out. It is the suck-breath moment of clarity that comes when dreams unspool themselves from the spindle of the waking mind. It is necessary and unavoidable. It was and is and will be.

But she doesn’t have the imagination to consider it in those terms. For her, it is saying yes to the body when all else is admonishing her no.

***

Outside, standing on the earth, feeling it spin beneath their feet, they reach with the same mirrored movement to hold fast to one another’s hands. For a singular moment their bodies are the hub of the great wheel. Above them the stars cast tails of light as though reality is a time-lapsed photograph. 

_I forgive you_ , they both whisper.


End file.
